Wirepine Holiday Picks
Tech that's as good as you are
You’re the best and you deserve the best! Affirmation tops Affiliation1 🙌🏽
Tis the season of lists so if you are considering a little tech to magic up 2024 - start scrolling! These are my favorite tech things where the product is innovative and thoughtfully designed with quality on both the hardware and software side.
Note! This is the first post where substack warned me it might get cutoff in email because it’s too big (product pics!). Hit the link to read online.
1. Ring Doorbell
If you have a door and packages show up there as well as people you may or may not want to talk to, get a Ring doorbell. The doorbell will ring your phone even if you’re visiting the north pole. Check who’s at your door and, if you want, answer virtually either with a pre-recorded message (the Grinch for the holidays!2) or live video. Motion detection lets you know whenever someone is at your door and records what’s going on. It’s a bit of visual security also like a sign on your lawn that you’re being recorded 👀. The doorbell is $99 and it’s about $40/year for the cloud service to save videos, use AI to recognize faces and prevent false motion alerts.
Ring also has a cool inventor backstory where said dude was tinkering in his mad scientist laboratory and kept missing people at the door and … voila!
If you have a working doorbell powered by doorbell energy (12v home wiring) then you just swap old for new. If not, it’s got a battery so you can put it wherever you want but then you have to charge the battery every couple of months which is a hassle.
2 WYZE Cam v3
Much love for this little guy 🫶 Mounted outside in freezing temps pummeled by wind and snow yet never fails to show me what’s going on from afar. Super cute and efficient Wall-E design with built in stand and all kinds of bits available to make mounting easy inside or outside. Like Ring, Wyze has a dedicated app and it’s good. I got an onboard memory card so it records continually, I also pay $20 a year for motion and noise alerts/cloud recording. It does a good job of people/car recognition to filter events and has a new feature where it will loop all events together in a timelapse video for a day-in-the-life of wherever you point it.
The quality of the live view at night is amazing and it’s still $30!
Ruh Roh - now that I looked it up I see a new PTZ version? Pan Tilt Zoom! oh my! I need that right?! it’s $1 more - how is this possible?!
3. Nest
Nest was a wonderful standalone startup built around one amazing product much like Ring. Ring made a smart doorbell, Nest made a smart thermostat. Ring got gobbled up by Amazon but kept them separate where they built a lineup of smart home devices and kept the dedicated app. Nest was not so lucky with Google and now they are part of the whole smart home automation mess which is unfortunate. 7 years ago I got the OG Ring Thermostat before they were assimilated into the Google borg. Super cool hardware design (Nest Labs was founded by former Apple Engineers) and app. The learning thermostat does away with schedules - you manually set it for a week and then it takes over based on your patterns. It also does clever stuff like turn off the heat or AC when you’re not in the house.
Last year when we were living up in the mountains, I got a new and cheaper version that doesn’t learn - you just set the schedule in the app but the app is now Google Home.
I miss the dedicated app but it works fine and better than their main competition which is Amazon’s Alexa smart home smorgasbord of gadgets. In our new house PG&E had a rebate on Amazon’s Smart Thermostat (twofer one!) but they’re not as good as Nest/Google. The hardware design is fine but the Alexa App is clunky and slow, bogged down by all of the other Alexa madness so I don’t recommend.
Speaking of Amazon Alexa … it’s too clunky for me; don’t recommend. During the pandemic I needed a way to see my dad on video so shipped him an Amazon Alexa Echo Show (ugh such a bad marketing name). For a while it worked, and I even got him into a few Zoom meetings with the whole family. Then I got myself one (I got the 5” screen while he had the 8” screen) so we could do direct video.
But the story doesn’t end well - he started getting frustrated when it didn’t work. They are fussy and the hardware is low end so the apps are laggy. Voice interfaces are definitely the future but unless you can’t wait to be just like the Jetsons, hold off for the next gen of smart home stuff and resist the urge to automate everything.
I still have the 2nd Gen 5” Echo Show sitting in a box - yours for the asking, let me know!
4. Eero
If your home network is spotty all this stuff becomes frustrating. At the cabin we were living in a tiny space, not a worry. Our new place is bigger, so after a bit of research I bought these guys:
They’re awesome. It was a hot mess in this space for a while with a ton of odd wi-fi extender solutions with weird antenna’s sticking out and then a slew of new ‘mesh’ wi-fi solutions, but the tech has jelled, and these guys work like a champ, app is super amazing, setup easy-peasy. I have Sonic Internet and they use Eero which is also handy, but Eero has one if not the best solution in this space so regardless of who you get your internet service from they should work no probs.
Like Ring, like Nest, they also have a cool inventor origin story ending in said inventor getting rich selling to big tech.
Young inventors out there keep imagining - what brilliant thing can you do with AI?
Ring acquired by Amazon for ~$1,000,000,000 (Billion)
Nest acquired by Google for $3,200,000,000 (Billion)
Eero acquired by Amazon for $97,000,000 (Million)
5. Sonos
I will never understand how you get stereo sound out of one speaker, but the sound from a single Sonos speaker amazes, filling the room. These aren’t bluetooth speakers, but wi-fi connected with no associated limitations and you stream from your phone on an app like Spotify. Sonos refreshed this model but you can still get original the Sonos One reconditioned or ‘Amazon Renewed.’
Here’s the new version and since the price difference isn’t that much, I’d get the new one if you’re going for the single speaker setup:
I went big in our new place because the Living Room is larger but also I wanted it to work with the TV. On flatscreen TV speakers the dialog gets lost in the soundtrack. Turn up the sound to hear the dialog and then the soundtrack hurts your head. Got a sound bar from Sonus and it’s great:
6. Roku
I jumped on the cable cutting bandwagon as soon as it started rolling with Roku and since I’ve had a bunch. Last round I just bought TV’s that run Roku’s TV OS natively. I like their UX (Blurple), I like the simplicity of the remote, I like their channel model, I like their App!
If you just want the basics, this guy will do you fine for under $30:
If you want something fancier, the Roku Ultra supports bigger TVs (4K) but also supports a plug in headset which is handy if you don’t want to listen to your niece watching The Last Airbender Xmas eve.
The TV at the cabin busted. I guess Samsung is not as good at handling the cold as Wyze, so got a TV with Roku built in. TCL makes these and they get a lot of love from Wirecutter. I was so happy with it that I got another one for Santa Rosa. Check them out here:
I have a sports problem. I’m not much of a fan but occasionally there’s a game someone wants to watch, and I don’t have cable. Sports streaming is nascent and fractured so you need more than one subscription to watch and, well it’s a mess. So, I just bought this Tablo over-the-air system that includes a modern version of bunny ears. They have a Roku channel so in theory I do all this without wires. Would be nice for news as well. Marriage of old tech and new tech. Low hopes; we’ll see. If it’s amazing, I’ll drop an update.
7. Computers
If you’re in the market for a computer (desktop) the best one I’ve ever had is my current Dell Precision workstation. Made for business, compact and zippy. Get a refurbished one from Dell’s outlet - the 3460 is one gen later than mine:
If you like Macs, go for the latest iMac and check my article on giving new life to an old one - they are super well designed.
8. Laptops
My current laptop is a Surface and it’s quite nice. Microsoft hardware has come a long way and is close to the same build quality and performance as a Macbook. Too many models/options to list but if you need a new one I’m happy to help you sort through it.
I’ve had a lot of laptops but my first one is still the best one - it was a ThinkPad. Originally built by IBM and now Lenovo and design/build is top shelf.
9. iPad & Apple Pencil
My iPad is 6 years old (1st gen iPad Pro); my Apple Pencil is 1st generation but I’ve grown to love them - I can type and scroll and draw on a screen 4X as big as my phones yet small and light enough to stick under my arm or fit on a teeny airplane table. Everything syncs so I can move from desktop to laptop to phone to iPad and my stuff is there.
I hear from a reputable source that the iPad Air with Apple Pencil 2nd generation is an amazing combo for notetaking say if you're a mechanical engineer about to graduate college.
10. You don’t need an App for that
You can’t go wrong with #1-9. If you got the need or desire - it’s the best personal tech in each category. There’s a theme - the best products are the combo of great hardware and software (typically a phone app).
Caveat emptor - there remains lots of silliness with everything needing an app and putting tech in stuff like toasters and toothbrushes where it doesn’t have any business. Do you need an app to tell you how to brush your teeth3?!
Happy Holidays all!
All the Amazon buttons in here are affiliate links. That means should you actually buy anything I get a cut. I have no idea how much? I signed up Monday and the only thing Amazon was clear on was if I didn’t get at least 3 purchases in 3 mos they’d shut my account down 🥹 I’m curious how affiliate marketing works under the covers. On the off chance someone does actually click-and-buy I’ll let you know my cut and maybe it’ll be enough to make some Wirepine MERCH for you!
You think the marketing guys from Waze who came up with the Cookie Monster voice had anything to do with this?
Credit Laszlo 🤓